Thursday, May 17, 2012

The Edgar G. Ulmer Week: Hannibal (1959)

One thing
is very clearly about the career of Edgar G. Ulmer: he could direct everything
- and it turned out really good if it had that extra edge in the story. I can
easily see why he directed Hannibal,
but more to that later. This wasn't the first time Ulmer worked on a bigger
budgeted costume-extravaganza. Pirates of Capri, also shot in Italy 1949, for example. When Hannibal came it was at the end of the trend in Hollywood and the only
one who really cared about making similar movies was the Italians - but with
smaller budgets: the so-called Peplums. Hannibal
probably had a modest budget, maybe around one million dollar and Ulmer did
everything to put those money on the screen.

Hannibal
(Victor Mature) leads his army of the Alps and after adventures and lots of
deaths the arrive in Italy.
One day he and his men catches a young woman and her best friend, Sylvia (Rita
Gam) and Quintilius (Terence Hill, under his real name of Mario Girotti). But Hannibal is a wise man
and lets them see his powerful elephant-army and sets them free. But Sylvia
falls in love with him and they keep contact, even if he's preparing to invade
the city. Her uncle - and the father of Quintilius - Fabius Maximus (the great Gabriele
Ferzetti) soon finds out what she's done and won't understand that her plan is
to make Hannibal and the Romans come to a friendly solution. The war-starved
Romans don't give a fuck about peace-talk and attacks... and tastes the first
rage of Hannibal's
killer elephants!

The budget
might be lower than usual, but Hannibal
is still one of the best historical epics from this time. It delivers the best
on all fronts: melodrama, action, dialogue and cool actors. Not only does this
movie have Terence Hill, Bud Spencer is in there somewhere also! What makes
this movie so strong is first of the down-to-earth gritty style of Edgar G.
Ulmer. Much of this can of course be explained by the low budget, but it has a
very cynical view on humanity and it's far more violent and disturbing in
others in the same genre. I've seen bloodier movies, but it's still pretty
graphic (arrow in the mouth, cut of arm, soldiers being crushed by elephants,
falling down from mountains, eaten by wolves etc) and the nasty screams mixed
into the soundtrack during the battle scenes makes everything so much brutal.
If you don't like nasty horse-falls maybe you should stay away from this flick,
because it's horses who falls because they're trained to do but because of
wires!

The second
detail that makes this movie so good is the charters. Victor Mature, a quite
stiff and not exactly a colourful actor, makes a perfect Hannibal. He's like a grizzled old fart, too
bitter to stop himself from fighting - even if he hates what he's doing. He's
not that far away from Tom Neal's character in Detour - a talented man who
wants to do good, but fuck things up whether he like it or not. Most of the
times when young women falls in love with older men in movies like this I
laugh, but Sylvia's love for Hannibal is well-written and I can buy her fascination
- a father figure. She even calls Quintilius, a man in her age, a
"child" several times. She wants a father, nothing else.

Hannibal has it's fair share of faults of
mistakes, everything because of the low budget and probably a quite fast
shooting schedule for this form of epic project. But if you can look beyond
shaky sets, stuntmen visibly holding spears meant to penetrating them, some
less-than-impressive extras in the background and some really lousy
night-for-day shots you'll find a damn impressive and pitch-black epic, more
edgy and interesting than all others in the genre. The ending is super-black,
very downbeat in that wonderful Ulmer-way and in a way very ironic. He builds
up a story that ends in a way that even I couldn't expect (and forgotten after
watching it several times before).

Hannibal is
out on an OK-looking DVD from VCI, the best it probably have looked since it
was out in cinemas - but still would need a new released with a restored print
as a source.

Off topic a little bit. Seeing Terence Hill and Bud Spencer in Supercops on a swedish tv channel last week made me realize again how much i love those movies. And i always will. I checked with an old friend if he watched it. Yep he even taped the event even though he have the bloody film on dvd. That is what i call a fan.